Reparations anyone?
By Kimberley Jane Wilson
web
posted June 11, 2001
In 1989, I was a college student in Washington, DC. On my campus, probably like most campuses around the country we had a group of upper classmen who seemed to spend all of their time in the yard talking and occasionally ranting about the social issues of the day. This is how I first heard about the reparations movement. One fellow, I'll call him Martin, was a Political Science major and a budding orator. On this particular day as I passed by him on my way to the library he was loudly saying that America owed black people a cash settlement for slavery.
Our ancestors, he reasoned, never got their forty acres and a mule as compensation for their bondage. Instead they and their descendants faced the Ku Klux Klan and the Jim Crow laws which were set up for the sole purpose of keeping them down. Martin proclaimed that black people have never had a fair deal in this country and thus, we all deserved a check.
I stopped to listen. Martin was known to be connoisseur of beer and I assumed he'd found himself a whole keg that morning. Some of the kids who listened to him giggled and made jokes but others nodded and looked serious. I dismissed Martin's idea as a pie-in-the-sky fantasy and continued on my way. It just seemed inconceivable that the United States government would ever send out checks to every black person with an apology note. Today I've come to believe that it could really happen.
Back
in 1989, the only people talking seriously about reparations were students
like Martin and a few fringe groups that were so small and so radical
that no one, black or white took them seriously. That has all changed.
Randall Robinson, author, activist, and well-known intellectual wrote
a book called The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks that boldly
embraced the reparations idea. As a result of Mr. Robinson's work, the
reparations movement really took off. A new article on the subject appears
in some magazine or newspaper every week now. Radio and news programs
have been devoted to the topic and just recently a major, mainstream newspaper,
the Philadelphia Inquirer published an editorial in support of reparations.
The reparations movement has come of age. Even those who oppose it must take it seriously.
American slavery was a sin. There's no getting around that. The principles of liberty, justice and equality didn't apply to the millions of Africans brought to America against their will which is why our history is full of racial ironies. When Thomas Jefferson wrote "All men are created equal," he was the owner of 187 slaves. Patrick Henry owned over 90 slaves when he shouted the famous words, "Give me liberty or give me death!" Union General Ulysses S. Grant fought the Confederacy but didn't free his own slaves until the Emancipation Proclamation. Even after slavery ended America, the land that was a beacon of freedom to people all over the world still treated black Americans with indignity and on occasion, savage cruelty.
Having said this I also must point out that not every white person in America owned slaves. Most Southerners couldn't even afford one. About half of all the white people walking around America today are descended from people who came to this country after slavery ended. Even if you believe in the concept of blood guilt it is unfair to ask these people to pay for the sins of someone else's fathers.
On a side note, does anybody have a clear idea of how the payment will be worked out? Will every black person who can prove that he or she is a descendent of slaves get a check? Will we all get a tax credit? Will every black child get a scholarship to the college of their choice? How black do you have to be to get reparations? If one of your parents, or grand parents is white are you still eligible? What about whites who are descended from black people who chose to "pass" for white? If they're willing to admit their black ancestry will they get a payment?
It's a little discussed part of history but whites were not the only ones to make a profit from slavery. Can we expect an apology from the governments of West Africa and the Arab nations? Both Arabs and Africans played a vital part in the business end of the slave trade. Will we be getting a reparations payment from Great Britain? After all colonial America belonged to England when slavery was introduced here in 1619. Do Native Americans owe us reparations? Some tribes took an active part in owning slaves. In fact, there were even free blacks who purchased slaves of their own. Do the descendants of these people owe reparations?
This all sounds like a big, messy bureaucratic nightmare. No amount of apologies and no amount of cash can wash the sin of slavery away. Giving me a check as "compensation" for the agony of my ancestors trivializes their suffering and I feel uneasy at the thought of making a profit from that suffering.
Every American slave owner is dead and the debt that they owe can only
be paid on Judgment Day. If reparations do become a reality the only concrete
thing I see happening afterwards is a souring of relations between black
and white people. Judging by the opinion polls most whites don't like
the reparations concept and I suspect that black people ages 45 and up
who remember what life under Jim Crow was like will find the gesture hollow
anyway. Get ready, folks. We are in for some interesting times. 
Kimberley Jane Wilson is a member of the National Advisory Board of the African-American leadership network Project 21 and a conservative writer living in Virginia.
Other related articles: (open in a new window)
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ad stirs controversy by John Nowacki (March 26, 2001)
John Nowacki blasts the disgraceful conduct of people angered by the slavery reparations advertising that David Horowitz has had run in some campus newspapers - Ten
Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea for Blacks - and Racist
Too (March 26, 2001)
Text of David Horowitz's ad on reparations - A
missed opportunity: Islam's Black Slaves reviewed by Steven Martinovich
(March 19, 2001)
Had Ronald Segal's Islam's Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora actually been about slavery under Islam, Steve Martinovich might have been satisfied. Instead, it was merely a veiled attack on the west
- Slavery
in our time by Kimberley Jane Wilson (February 14, 2000)
Slavery wasn't invented in the United States, writes Kimberley Jane Wilson, and nor has it ended around the world